The numbers come first, and they are unambiguous.
CGTrader, an online marketplace with more than two million 3D models for sale, introduced AI-generated asset uploads roughly a year ago. According to a company report drawing on marketplace sales data from June 2025 through May 2026, one in six models uploaded to the platform is now AI-generated. Yet those assets accounted for just $1 out of every $90 in generated revenue, and just 2.6% of sales.
'AI is entering the catalog rapidly, but buyers aren't yet opening their wallets for it,' the report stated.
CGTrader CEO Dalia Lasaite offered a direct explanation for the gap between supply and demand. 'Buyers are looking for really high quality when they are shopping at the marketplace,' Lasaite told Fortune. 'And as a result, they tend to prefer human-created 3D models, at least at this point.' Only 5% of CGTrader's customers tried an AI model and found it worked well, compared to 20% who tried it and found the assets inadequate.
The pattern extends beyond 3D models. Dennis Zhang, a professor of marketing and supply chain, operations, and technology at Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School, examined app launches following the wide release of coding agents Claude Code and Codex. His working research found approximately a 160% increase in apps launched by April 2026 compared to two years prior. But the number of apps accumulating more than 10 reviews dropped significantly after the AI launches, suggesting people engaged less with AI-generated apps than human-made ones. Zhang noted these results were not causal.
'There is some slight evidence showing that the products that are helped by AI in production are less attractive than the products where we had observed before,' Zhang told Fortune, while adding that 'it's not like the AI products are unloved by everyone — it's still creating utilities for the market.'
Consumer sentiment data reinforces the marketplace behavior. A Pew Research Center poll found half of Americans said they liked a painting less after learning it was made by AI. A separate Pew report published this week found 52% of American adults were 'more concerned than excited' about greater AI use in daily life, compared to 38% who said the same in 2022. A 2025 Stanford University study offered a counterpoint, finding that participants given access to a marketplace with both AI-generated and human-produced art gravitated toward AI-generated pieces — a reminder that the picture is not entirely one-sided.
Zhang framed the broader economic implication plainly: 'It's not only people as workers will re-pivot to something else to do, it's also people as consumers will re-pivot to the dimension that humans will matter more.'
The market has already voted. What CGTrader's data illustrates is a principle free-enterprise readers will recognize immediately: abundance does not equal value. Flooding a marketplace with low-cost, AI-generated supply does not compel a single buyer to open a wallet. Quality, trust, and craftsmanship remain the scarce goods consumers are willing to pay for — and no algorithm changes that calculus overnight. For platforms and creators alike, the lesson is straightforward: the competitive advantage still belongs to whoever delivers the better product, not whoever delivers the most.
